Enterprise Approaches
Most of the approaches discussed on this site apply primarily to a single project, solving a single business problem. Some organisations prefer to take a more enterprise-wide focus to their business solutions. Organisations wishing to do this need to be clear about what they hope to achieve in doing so. Typical objectives are:
- Managing requirements across a portfolio of applications
- Seamless integration of applications
- Consistent application of business logic through reuse
- Consistent look and feel
- Data consistency
There are also penalties associated with an enterprise-wide focus. Some are:
- Increased development effort and time-to-benefit for those applications that lay the foundation architecture
- Increased risk of significant refactoring of those applications that lay the foundation architecture as that architecture changes
- Increased effort in the development of comprehensive packaging schemes for requirements management, model structures, and configuration management
- Reduced opportunity to apply agile techniques (agile techniques often focus on delivering results, but cut down on the documentation left for the use of future projects)
The bottom line is that there is usually a significant ROI penalty for a period of time after embarking upon such an approach. This period can be from months to years. The organisation needs to be fully committed to the approach and prepared to stick to it for the long haul in order to reap the rewards of the initial investment. In todays business environment, where it is essential for business to respond quickly to changing market conditions, few organisations are prepared to commit to such a long-term strategy.
For organisations that do choose to take the plunge, the place to start is the enterprise requirements management strategy. Consistent, integrated requirements are an essential part of the strategy to achieve the objectives described above. It can be difficult to get the requirements consistent and correct without basing them upon a consistent, integrated enterprise business model. The other essential part of the strategy is consistent, integrated enterprise software architecture.
